Cloud storage veteran Dropbox officially entered the online document collaboration space with its new service, Paper, which was announced last October. Today, Dropbox opened the beta up to the public, sans waitlist, and released beta versions of Paper for Android and iOS.
Paper is pitted against some very well-known and widely adopted services, such as Google Docs, Microsoft Office and OneNote, Evernote and Quip. It not only focuses heavily on the ease of creation of rich text documents, but also on team collaboration.
Keeping in mind that this is very much still a beta, here are some tips to get you started with Paper.
Embed all the things
Paper not only supports rich text, but rich media embedding. Paste a link to a YouTube video, SoundCloud audio file, GIF, picture or any other media and Paper will automatically embed the media into the document. After the media has embedded itself, you can choose to leave or delete the URL; other collaborators will also be able to comment on the media.
Drag and drop galleries
If you're using Paper from the web client at paper.dropbox.com, you can easily drag and drop any photos that you want to add to a document from your desktop. To rearrange those pictures, you can drag and drop them within the document and they will automatically resize and arrange themselves in a collage-style layout.
The easiest table creation you've ever used
To create a table, hover your cursor over a new line and click the plus sign. Immediately, a four-cell (two-by-two) table will appear.
To insert a new row or column, click anywhere inside the table and look for one of the grey dots near one of the intersects of the cells. To delete an entire row or column, click inside the table to reveal the borders. Click one of the border cells to select all cells in that row or column. Clicking the border cell in the upper left corner will select all cells in the table. Once selected, pressing Delete will remove all content from the cells. Pressing it once more will delete the rows, columns or the entire table.
Shortcuts
Getting to know the shortcuts will help you add elements to your Paper documents faster, and if you're familiar with Markdown at all, the shortcuts will feel very natural. On a new line:
- Typing # and adding a space will create an H1 header. Likewise, ## will insert an H2 header and ### will create an H3 header.
- A hyphen followed by a space will start an unordered list.
- A number and a period followed by a space will start an ordered list.
- Typing open and close bracket without a space between them starts a checklist.
- Entering three hyphens creates a divider.
